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Siegmund Gruber didn’t take long to decide Oliver Glasner was his man. “We were convinced from the moment we met him,” says the chief executive of the Austrian club Lask. “Oliver started his presentation and it was like that scene in Jerry Maguire: ‘You had me at hello.’”
It was the summer of 2015 and the future Crystal Palace manager had been persuaded to leave SV Ried, where he had made more than 500 appearances and been named player of the century before taking over as manager the previous year, for their main rivals. What made things worse was that Lask, after going bankrupt under the previous owners and losing their stadium, had just been promoted from the third division, while Ried had finished mid-table in the Austrian Bundesliga.
“It was a really, really big thing here,” Gruber says. “No one understood why a coach was going from a team in the top flight to a second division team. But Oliver understood what the project was and he believed in it – he decided to take one step back to try and take two forward. I think this is one of his biggest abilities: that he is able to see a way to keep progressing.”
A decade on from his controversial defection, Glasner will lead Palace into their third FA Cup final on Saturday, against Manchester City, hoping to make history by winning the club’s first major trophy. Speak to those who have closely followed the career of the 50-year-old who grew up in the village of Riedau – about 20 kilometres from the club where he made his name as a player – and none have been surprised by his impact in south London.
“In Frankfurt, Oliver Glasner is a legend for the Eintracht fans and they still miss him,” says the journalist Christopher Michel, who covered Glasner’s 2022 triumph in the Europa League when the German side overcome Barcelona in the quarter-finals and beat Rangers in the final. “A lot of them still believe that he could have achieved even greater things.”
There are no hard feelings at Ried towards Glasner, who met his long-serving assistant Michael Angerschmid when both signed for the club as 18-year-olds. “When Oliver comes home he’s already like an idol for everyone,” says Gruber.
As players Glasner and Angerschmid helped Ried win the Austrian Cup in 1998 – the club’s first major trophy – before the former left when they were relegated in 2003 and tried his luck with Lask. Injuries meant he played only three times and returned to Ried after a year, eventually winning the cup again in 2011 at the age of 37. A few months later, Glasner was preparing to face the Danish club Brøndby in a Europa League qualifier when he had a brain haemorrhage after a heading drill in training. He was taken to hospital in Copenhagen after pleading with a teammate with whom he was sharing a room to raise the alarm and needed an emergency operation to save his life. “It’s the last thing I can remember,” he said in an interview last month of asking his teammate to call a doctor.
Glasner has spoken regularly about how that experience has shaped his fearless approach to management. He was forced to retire but had completed a Diplom-Kaufmann – an MBA or master of business administration – while playing. Glasner joined Red Bull Salzburg initially as a management assistant before being promoted by the sporting director Ralf Rangnick to become Roger Schmidt’s assistant to the first team, winning two Austrian titles. When Schmidt went to Bayer Leverkusen, Glasner returned home and his spell in charge of Ried lasted 12 months before Gruber came calling.
Gruber recalls how Glasner, who was appointed sporting director and head coach, refused to accept his players would be left with nowhere to train because the club was installing new pitches: “Oliver took the groundsman’s plans home and made his own timeline so at least one of the pitches was always available. He turned everything around.”
Lask finished second in Glasner’s first season and Gruber came under pressure to sack him. “One thing I learned from Oliver is that even if results are what are important in football, let’s look at the performances,” he says. “At Crystal Palace, there were a lot of people who questioned him when this season got off to a bad start. But you can see what has happened when he is given time: he will deliver.”
Lask were promoted the following season, then qualified for Europe by finishing fourth in the top flight, gaining a reputation for the innovative 3-4-2-1 system that has served Glasner so well since. “He develops average players,” Gruber says. “You don’t need the best ones in the world. Nearly every player improved.”
Glasner, having ended the next season as runners-up to secure Champions League qualification and Lask’s highest finish since their only title in 1965, joined Wolfsburg and enjoyed similar success. That spell lasted two seasons despite Glasner leading them to fourth and again qualifying for the Champions League. “Wolfsburg was a boring club for him,” says Michel, who is the editor of the Absolut Fussball website. “I think coming to Eintracht Frankfurt really opened his eyes about how cool a club can be.”
Glasner initially found things hard at Eintracht. But the club’s first win at Bayern Munich in more than 20 years was the catalyst for an unbeaten Europa League campaign that ended with the triumph in Seville . “It took some time until he found the right system,” says Michel. “Then they had the perfect mix. It’s very typical Glasner that he relies on his key players – he does not change them very much.”
Glasner was spotted a few days after the final wearing a sombrero, sunglasses and a shirt bearing the name of Ajdin Hrustic, an Australian who scored one of the penalties in the shootout, in a bar on Ballermann beach, which is favoured by some of the more hedonistic German tourists in Mallorca. Eintracht made it to the knockout stages of the Champions League the following season but Glasner, despite his popularity with supporters, departed in the summer after a difference of opinions with the sporting director, Markus Krösche, over investment in the squad.
Their loss has been Palace’s gain. Glasner’s wife and three children are in Austria and he relies heavily on a backroom staff that includes Angerschmid, Ronald Brunmayr – another former Ried player – and the former Middlesbrough defender Emanuel Pogatetz. “If he could, Oliver would talk about football for 18 hours every day,” Gruber says. “He sometimes wouldn’t sleep when we had lost a game and stayed up until six in the morning analysing what went wrong. His assistants sometimes help him relax by talking about other things.”
Glasner has been a keen skier since childhood but has not had much time to hit the slopes since arriving at Palace in February 2024. A team built very much in his image have emerged from the squad inherited from Roy Hodgson. Glasner has a year on his contract and has held talks about extending. Whatever the outcome at Wembley, Palace will be desperate to show they can match his aspirations.
“When he is convinced about a project and if the club can fulfil his ambitions in terms of signing players then he may want to stay longer at Palace,” says Gruber, who says several “big clubs” have been in touch asking how to reach his former manager.
“I’ve said: ‘OK but prepare yourself for the meeting. Because Oliver will have questions – not some, I will say a lot!’ He is much smarter than a coach who comes in and just does a presentation on how his team will play. And I’m quite sure that won’t change with the bigger clubs.”
